I used to work on one of these

[spot]

Can anyone find pictures of their old work environments?

I went looking after I found this pic on the BBC this evening. It's the first working transistor (or a replica in a science museum, more likely). I didn't work on one of these.

[spot]

This is the first model I was paid to play with, it's a NCR 315. Anything I used before this was just for fun and didn't look as neat.

It had 40kB of main memory in the form of 0.015" diameter six inch rods, each of which held 40 bits at 800ns. Memory took up quite a bit of space.

You could tell who operated these things from the paper cuts on their fingers off the high-speed 5 channel paper tape reader.

[RedGlitter]

That's very cool, Spot.

I don't have anything that interesting really, but I used to work in a wire tie factory. We made twist ties for Mobil Oil and those long foil twist ties they use on grocery produce.

Then for a few years I worked as a hairdresser and I got paid to do bad things to people's hair...like this 80s 'do I'm posting here.

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[Bryn Mawr]

My first PC - cost me £275 in 1978.



http://oldcomputers.net/osi-600.html

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[Kathy Ellen]

When I was about 19 yrs. old, I worked at the Maxwell House Coffee plant in Hoboken, NJ. It was a dream job:-4 Couldn't handle all the secretarial work, so they put me in charge of taking pictures of the plant and workers. I then drank delish coffee all day and worked on the pictures for promotional shots. Still drink Maxwell House sometimes.

[Bryn Mawr]

The first "mainframe" I programmed - a valve job that took up a fair sized room to hold its 4K of memory.

Great fun to play with :-

http://archive.computerhistory.org/reso ... 646083.pdf

[Bryn Mawr]

The first computer I worked on commercially.

32K of ferrite core memory. No console typewriter or disk drives and we ran the company on it

http://www.forumgarden.com/forums/newre ... 1&p=721717

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[spot]

Bryn Mawr;721717 wrote: The first "mainframe" I programmed - a value job that took up a fair sized room to hold its 4K of memory.That looks entirely British, I wonder what happened to them.

The photo of the NCR shows a woman in a red dress holding a 5MB CRAM deck. The unit in front of her is misleading in that I never in my life saw one which still had the front panel attached - access to the drum was far too essential to leave it covered up like that. It might explain why ours were so noisy though. I doubt whether any site had just a single CRAM unit either, there tended to be either two (one input and one output masterfile) or three if the transactions and batch session totals were kept there instead of on tape reels.

[Bryn Mawr]

spot;721725 wrote: That looks entirely British, I wonder what happened to them.

The photo of the NCR shows a woman in a red dress holding a 5MB CRAM deck. The unit in front of her is misleading in that I never in my life saw one which still had the front panel attached - access to the drum was far too essential to leave it covered up like that. It might explain why ours were so noisy though. I doubt whether any site had just a single CRAM unit either, there tended to be either two (one input and one output masterfile) or three if the transactions and batch session totals were kept there instead of on tape reels.


Dutch design made in the USA as far as I recall.

The CRAM units were ingenious bits of kit given the alternatives at the time.

[spot]

This one's Burroughs Medium Systems, mine was a 1MHz 50kB model. The disk cabinets behind the operator in the middle distance were 20MB per spindle, five spindles to the aisle, three aisles total and they had a resident Burroughs engineer with his own on-site office to keep them aligned and working. It's one of the few mainframes I was allowed to both operate and program.

[Bryn Mawr]

spot;721732 wrote: This one's Burroughs Medium Systems, mine was a 1MHz 50kB model. The disk cabinets behind the operator in the middle distance were 20MB per spindle, five spindles to the aisle, three aisles total and they had a resident Burroughs engineer with his own on-site office to keep them aligned and working. It's one of the few mainframes I was allowed to both operate and program.






300MB of disk space and it needed a resident engineer to keep it going - this goes some way to explaining why so much effort was expended in keeping storage use down.

That, and the lack of MIPs, made for some very tight programming - unlike today's bloatware.

[spot]

Bryn Mawr;721736 wrote: 300MB of disk space and it needed a resident engineer to keep it going - this goes some way to explaining why so much effort was expended in keeping storage use down.It's a reflection of how times change that your pocket mp3 player undoubtedly has more permanent storage than that, and faster access too. To get 5ms average access time to that data those units had a dedicated head for every track of storage on every cylinder. Go on, re-read the sentence, you didn't get it first time.

Shall we get more recent? Here's a DEC 11/70 which (unlike the 11/35 I was more used to) ran IAS instead of the more familiar RSTS. I ran projects on both, they were fast and friendly. When they turned into VAXes they were less so - I expect they got clogged up more.







And this next one was probably the smallest computer I'd ever seen when I first worked on it. It took 8" floppy disks if you only had a briefcase or 10MB platters if you could cope with heavier hand luggage. The example in the photo's in a forlorn state.





I'm still in the 1970s, you'll notice.

[Bryn Mawr]

Oh I got it all right - I was just trying to picture the array and how many deep the heads would have to be to fit them all in.

Frightening



Like the B80 - just been reading Chris Pickles descriptions that go with the photo. Have you seen :-

http://www.hgriggs.com/computers.html

a fun little write up

[spot]

Bryn Mawr;721747 wrote: Oh I got it all right - I was just trying to picture the array and how many deep the heads would have to be to fit them all in.From memory, having seen one disembowelled in the process of servicing, each surface had either 12 or 16 spokes and every 12th or 16th track was read and written from a single spoke. The next spoke along was permanently wound in a quarter twist on the thread to balance the heads to the next track set, and so on.

[Pheasy]

I used to use these at work - now thats showing my age :-5





And those computers you have pictures of too

[spot]

ThePheasant;721754 wrote: I used to use these at work - now thats showing my age :-5


Pheasy, fortunecity won't let you hotlink, here's another copy of what you posted...

[Pheasy]

:wah:

I agree Spot.

I used to write the programs, then they would get sent to another department for input, then I would find out I made a mistake, then the whole cycle would begin again for my corrections :-5

[Bryn Mawr]

spot;721759 wrote: Pheasy, fortunecity won't let you hotlink, here's another copy of what you posted...




That's cruel :wah:

I guess what Pheasy meant was :-

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[Bryn Mawr]

or even :-

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[Bryn Mawr]

Bryn Mawr;721770 wrote: or even :-


Some of the operators took great delight in shuffling a few of the cards in a program deck before entering them - confused the hell out of the programmers

They got us back by giving us gert long patches to fix the resultant bugs

[Pheasy]

Bryn Mawr;721771 wrote: Some of the operators took great delight in shuffling a few of the cards in a program deck before entering them - confused the hell out of the programmers

They got us back by giving us gert long patches to fix the resultant bugs


Dropping the whole deck was a beaut too :wah:

[Pheasy]

spot;721759 wrote: Pheasy, fortunecity won't let you hotlink, here's another copy of what you posted...




:D That was my other job :sneaky:

[spot]

Bryn Mawr;721771 wrote: Some of the operators took great delight in shuffling a few of the cards in a program deck before entering them - confused the hell out of the programmers :-)I remember using an IBM sorter to rectify that sort of wrecking - not, I think, this model 80, I seem to remember the one I used was a Model 82, but they look similar and the controller on the right edge was much the same.

[along-for-the-ride]

My first job, after babysitting, was working at Burger King. Included a pic.:wah:

Then, I work at a blueprint shop and operated a machine like this one. We made blueprints, blackline prints and sepias for architects and builders.

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[sunny104]

I drove one of these for 5 years..... :-6

[Pheasy]

sunny104;722200 wrote: I drove one of these for 5 years.....






NOW THATS COOL!! 'high-five' Sunny :-6

[sunny104]

ThePheasant;722201 wrote: NOW THATS COOL!! 'high-five' Sunny :-6


:D :-4

it was the coolest thing I've ever done...we might go on the road again once the kiddies are grown up.....:-6

[YZGI]

My first job..